Flash 8 is now available in all its glory. You can get a trial version of it from here.

We should be getting it in work pretty soon, but i’ve installed the trial at home and i’ve got to say, it works a treat. Now all we have to do is wait 2 years for everyone to install the player so we can actually produce content for it.

I think macromedia have done a lot about ease of distribution this time with their live upgrade features, but it remains to be seen if this will have a large impact. You still need admin privileges on the machine you’re trying to install on, so don’t expect this to be as smooth as macromedia would have us think. Especially for people on corporate networks (i.e. me)